EnTrip

India 4 City Roundtrip

Anthony, 2,600 miles, May 08

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Anthony - Tue 22 April 10.00

Delhi is a place i'd like to see for several reasons.

First of all, there's a BarCamp in Delhi on the 10th which should be an interesting venue for us to go to.

Also, Sachin, a friend from Uni, is there, running SMX ( www.smxtech.net ) and Nivio ( www.nivio.com ). Should be interesting to catch up with him again, see their offices, etc.

Sachin has kindly offered us to stay in their guest house/corporate accommodation, what a legend!

Also, Delhi is the Capital of India, and how can I claim to be traveller without at least trying to see some of Delhi. Maybe if time permits, we'll pop over to the Taj as well, u know, just to say been there done that and got the picture.

Also, if Alicia is going to be in Delhi, it'll be good to meet up again!

Nick is going to Join me in Delhi to continue the journey together.

India 4 City Roundtrip

Anthony, 2,600 miles, May 08

India 4 City Roundtrip (Simple)

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Anthony - Wed 14 May 09.00

So Delhi, the capital of India and where 1billion are ruled from - what do you have to offer?

Leaving the Airport is not the most pleasant of experiences, the arrivals leads right into a massive hall with hundreds of people waiting to pick you up. Only problem is, that hundreds of people waiting in a hall at 30 degreesC gets a bit smelly...

So my first experience of Delhi is the stench of the friends and family members waiting to see a familiar face. Nice!

The next thing I noticed was the distinctly higher temperature. I arrived around 20h and it was dark, but boy was it hot! Pune is located on a plateau about 400m above sea level, while Delhi is ... just hot! Since I am stingy, I took the non A/C cab, and kind of wished I hadn't.

Another VERY noticeable difference between Delhi and places like Pune, Mumbai or Bangalore (haven't been to other places yet): Traffic. The traffic, while generally congested during peak hours, seems to be much more civilised. Pollution is hardly noticeable since all Rickshaws and Busses run on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), as the CNG stickers and green coloured public vehicles indicate. That's what I call political will well implemented - Pune there's something to be learned here!

We are put up in GK2 - a posher residential area of Delhi. Houses and apartments are flanked by massive mansions and villas, parks and greenery add peace to the quiet streets.

I don't want to go on about the poor taxi driver again, who, of course, had NO CLUE where he was supposed to take me before he took me on board, but have I mentioned the concept of 'Random Information' before?

If not, I'm sure will blog about it some other time, but basically, Random Information is information that we get everyday, and which influences our decisionmaking, even though it shouldn't. Asking for directions is the best example, and in India, people never admit that they have no clue where places are, and just tell you some random piece of information. Following this, you would be wasting time and walking around in the heat unnecessarily, just because you let Random Information affect your decision making.

Nowadays, I always try to get something like three references before I follow any direction I receive here, more often than not, at least two are pointing in completely different directions...

Anyways, this is about Delhi, and not about my rant...

India 4 City Roundtrip

Anthony, 2,600 miles, May 08

India 4 City Roundtrip (Simple)

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Anthony - Tue 20 May 14.00

Nivio - the online desktop company on www.nivio.com is a great and innovative service which beams a personal windows XP desktop that is associated with your Nivio account to you, anywhere in the world, where you can log in to Nivio over the internet. Basically, forget buying a new PC every one and a half years, just get any old crappy machine which has access to moderately fast internet, and enjoy a flawless Windows experience at high speeds and a sheer infinite amount of software.

On the click of a button, you can add MS Excel to your subscription and start using it. Since all computation is made on Nivio servers, your computer doesn't have to be very fast.

What an awsome Idea, think about how this will help bridge the digital divide and how this will simplify IT infrastructure deployment and maintenance for companies!

The company is owned by Sachin Duggal, a friend from Uni.

Right, enough free adverts for Nivio here ;-)

Visiting their offices was one of the reasons for coming to Delhi. Seeing how so many multinationals have come to India and Delhi to set up shop in sleek, modern, glass-clad high-rise buildings, It was quite a pleasant change to see the Nivio office in a 'normal' down to earth office area.

Inside, the office reminds me of our Computing labs in EEE at Imperial, with round tables and a very open and communicative atmosphere. They have TT tables in the recreational area, and generally seems like a cool place to work!

Our office, should we ever furnish it (which I hope we will) will certainly also make use of the open round table set up from Imperial/Nivio, though we will probably save some electricity costs by turning the AC down to room temperature only, and not to arctic mode ;-) !

Thumbs up to Nivio!

India 4 City Roundtrip

Anthony, 2,600 miles, May 08

India 4 City Roundtrip (Simple)

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Anthony - Sun 18 May 09.00

Clear

From blog.entrip.com:

Last Saturday, May 17 2008, Nick and Anthony attended BarCamp Delhi 4 at AMITY Innovation Incubator (unfortunately, Adil was sick in Hyderabad…). In the morning, we spontaneously decided to give a demo and presentation of EnTrip, and hurriedly put together some bits and pieces.

Nick prepared the technical parts of the Demo, getting it run the way we want to, and Anthony attended several presentations and met fellow entrepreneurs. After a long and interesting day of presentations on all kinds of topics - building sustainable businesses, building facebook apps, etc - we had the last slot of the day and gave it our best.

Anthony started giving the presentation, and wanted to deliver the key message of ‘if a problem can be defined, it can be solved. Your imagination is the limit to what you can do’ - which is what we have been experiencing greatly, over the past months, as well as telling our (hopefully) interesting and entertaining, maybe inspiring, story. A brief summary of EnTrip, our vision and what we’ve done so far rounded off the talk, before handing over to Nick to give the demo. He gave a concise overview of what the EnTrip system can do, and emphasized our focus on simplicity and ease of use. BarCampers had the privilege to preview some of the exciting improvements and new features we’ve been working on since release 1.1.5 . He finally finished by doing some Wiz-style coding, LIVE, to demonstrate the scalability of our architecture.

The responses and feedback we received were very encouraging and boosted our high moral even further. Thanks to all those BarCampers who attended our talk!

Overall, we are very happy we gave the presentation, and attended BarCamp Delhi in general. Lesson learned: things generally turn out better than anticipated, if approached with due consideration and confidence!

Thanks again for all you wonderful BarCampers, and to Piyush Gupta for taking a lead in putting things together!

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